Glen Downs: Get GOP Factions in Line, Then Take Fight to Obama

The president's post-election speech in which he tried to present a front of compromise was merely parroting "poll tested language" that he read off a teleprompter, according to Glen Downs, chief of staff for Rep. Walter B. Jones of North Carolina.

How House Speaker John Boehner will handle warring factions within his party is not yet known — he has sparred with tea party-aligned members — but Downs predicted that Boehner would work to marginalize his previously confrontational tone.

"My concern, though, is that that's not really going to happen because you've got a large majority, but a majority is really a coalition of multiple groups of people, more like the Democratic Conference has been over the years," he said. "We'll see how confrontational or cooperative everybody is very soon."

"Now that we've got this Republican majority in the Senate, will we find the case that for a while there's an effort for everybody to get along and to move some small-ball kinds of legislation, send back over to the Senate some of the legislation that had previously passed the House and the Senate just ignored it and start getting some success that way or will we — things like what President Obama just did to say hey I'm going to be confrontational rather than cooperative, I still got my pen?" said Downs. "Will that force showdowns that Republican leadership don't really want right now?"

Asked about the difference between the Republican victory in 2004 with Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America and 2014, Downs said Americans 20 years ago were much more hopeful for change.

"Today … people are much more despairing about the future, people see a less bright future for their children and for themselves," he said. "People are much more cynical, the body politic is much more cynical about the ability and the willingness of any majority, including this new Republican majority to do something about that."

The president’s post-election speech in which he tried to present a front of compromise was merely parroting “poll tested language” that he read off a teleprompter, according to Glen Downs, chief of staff for Rep. Walter B. Jones of North Carolina.